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Tails 4.5 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

New features

Secure Boot

Tails now starts on computers with Secure Boot enabled.

If your Mac displays the following error:

Security settings do not allow this Mac to use an external startup disk.

Then you have to change the settings of the Startup Security Utility of your Mac to authorize starting from Tails.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.9.

    This update fixes several vulnerabilities in Firefox, including some critical ones.

    Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing these vulnerabilities.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.5

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.5.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.5 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.6 is scheduled for May 5.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-04-07 Tags:
Call for testing: 4.5~rc1

Tails 4.5, scheduled for April 7, will be the first version of Tails to support Secure Boot.

You can help Tails by testing the release candidate for Tails 4.5 now.

Secure Boot

Tails 4.5~rc1 should start on computers in UEFI mode and with Secure Boot enabled.

Known issues

If your Mac displays the following error:

Security settings do not allow this Mac to use an external startup disk.

Then you have to change the change the settings of the Startup Security Utility of your Mac to authorize starting from Tails.

Read our instructions on how to authorize starting from Tails on your Mac.

To open Startup Security Utility:

  1. Turn on your Mac, then press and hold Command(⌘)+R immediately after you see the Apple logo. Your Mac starts up from macOS Recovery.

  2. When you see the macOS Utilities window, choose Utilities ▸ Startup Security Utility from the menu bar.

  3. When you are asked to authenticate, click Enter macOS Password, then choose an administrator account and enter its password.

Startup Security Utility

In the Startup Security Utility:

  • Choose No Security in the Secure Boot section.

  • Choose Allow booting from external media in the External Boot.

To still protect your Mac from starting on untrusted external media, you can set a firmware password, available on macOS Mountain Lion or later. A firmware password prevents users who do not have the password from starting up from any media other than the designated startup disk.

If you forget your firmware password it will require an in-person service appointment with an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.

Read more on Apple Support about:

See the list of long-standing issues.

How to test Tails 4.5~rc1?

Keep in mind that this is a test image. We tested that it is not broken in obvious ways, but it might still contain undiscovered issues.

Please, report any new problem to tails-testers@boum.org (public mailing list).

Get Tails 4.5~rc1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 or later to 4.5~rc1.

    To do an automatic upgrade to Tails 4.5~rc1:

    1. Start Tails 4.2 or later and ?set an administration password.

    2. Run this command in a Terminal:

      echo TAILS_CHANNEL=\"alpha\" | sudo tee -a /etc/os-release && \
     tails-upgrade-frontend-wrapper

      Enter the administration password when asked for the "password for amnesia".

    3. After the upgrade is applied, restart Tails and choose Applications ▸ Tails ▸ About Tails to verify that you are running Tails 4.5~rc1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To download 4.5~rc1

Direct download

BitTorrent download

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

What's coming up?

Tails 4.5 is scheduled for April 7.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-03-27 Tags:
Tails 4.4.1 is out

This release is an emergency release to fix security vulnerabilities in Tor Browser and Tor.

You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Included software

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.4.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2, 4.2.2, 4.3, and 4.4 to 4.4.1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.4.1 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.5 is scheduled for April 7.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-03-23 Tags:
JavaScript sometimes enabled in the Safest security level of Tor Browser

Tor is aware of a technical issue that allows JavaScript execution in the Safest security level of Tor Browser in some situations.

Until then, do the following to completely disable JavaScript instead of setting the security level:

  1. Open the address about:config in Tor Browser.

  2. Click the I accept the risk! button.

  3. At the top of the page, search for javascript.enabled.

  4. Double-click on the javascript.enabled line in the results to set its value to false.

This issue will be fixed in the next release of Tails.

Posted 2020-03-19
Tails 4.4 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Изменения и улучшения

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.6.

  • Update Thunderbird to 68.5.0.

  • Update Linux to 5.4.19. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

Fixed problems

  • Tentatively fix Wi-Fi interfaces with Realtek RTL8822BE and RTL8822CE chipsets. (#17323)

    If you had a problem with Wi-Fi starting from Tails 4.1, please let us know whether your problem was fixed or not.

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

JavaScript sometimes enabled in the Safest security level of Tor Browser

Tor is aware of a technical issue that allows JavaScript execution in the Safest security level of Tor Browser in some situations.

Until then, do the following to completely disable JavaScript instead of setting the security level:

  1. Open the address about:config in Tor Browser.

  2. Click the I accept the risk! button.

  3. At the top of the page, search for javascript.enabled.

  4. Double-click on the javascript.enabled line in the results to set its value to false.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.4

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2, 4.2.2, and 4.3 to 4.4.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.4:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.5 is scheduled for April 7.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-03-12 Tags:
Tails report for February, 2020

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.3:

  • We included the trezor package, which provides a command line tool to use a Trezor hardware wallet for cryptocurrencies.

  • Fix the progress bar and prevent closing the window while an upgrade is being applied. (#16603)

Code

  • We made great progress on Secure boot support (#6560) and are now quite confident we can ship this in Tails 4.5 (April 7).

    Thanks to everyone who answered our call for testing!

  • In order to make the development process a bit smoother, we improved the performance of our builds (#17439, #17386).

  • We kept working on replacing Sikuli in our test suite (#15460), which will allow running it on recent Debian systems. We're almost there! :)

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users are still complaining about Seahorse failing to import public keys

  2. Several users reported that Stefano Zacchiroli's public key being expired since 2020-02-07 broke our documentation about using the command line and GnuPG to install Tails

  3. And people are still reporting GDM errors with Intel HD 630 (while their issue is usually with their NVidia Maxwell discreet GPU)

Infrastructure

  • We've been working towards making our CI feedback loop shorter (#16960, #17439).

  • We organized the sysadmin work we will need to do as part of migrating to GitLab.

Funding

  • We worked on the full proposal for the joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project to the DRL Internet Freedom program.

  • We started working on a grant proposal to the Prototype Fund.

Jobs

On-going discussions

Press and testimonials

Translations

All the website

  • de: 34% (2176) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • es: 53% (3373) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 27% (1714) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 90% (5671) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy
  • it: 30% (1948) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 22% (1432) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • de: 65% (1168) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • es: 94% (1691) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 98% (1755) strings translated, 0% strings fuzzy
  • it: 64% (1147) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 45% (820) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 808 936 times this month. This makes 27 894 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-03-11
Tails 4.3 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

New features

  • We included the trezor package, which provides a command line tool to use a Trezor hardware wallet for cryptocurrencies.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.5.

  • Update Thunderbird to 68.4.1.

  • Update Linux to 5.4.13. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

  • Update Tor to 0.4.2.6.

  • Update the VirtualBox Guest Additions to 6.1.2.

Fixed problems

  • Fix the progress bar and prevent closing the window while an upgrade is being applied. (#16603)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.3

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 and 4.2.2 to 4.3.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.3:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.4 is scheduled for March 10.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-02-11 Tags:
Tails report for January, 2020

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:

  • Improvements to automatic upgrades

    We worked on important improvements to the automatic upgrade feature, which is still one of your major pain points when using Tails:

    • Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to upgrade to Tails 3.14.

      Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from all prior versions to the latest version.

    • Until now, you could only do a limited number of automatic upgrades, after which you had to do a much more complicated "manual" upgrade.

      Starting with 4.2, you will only have to do a manual upgrade between major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 in 2021.

    • We made automatic upgrades use less memory.

    • We optimized a bit the size of the download when doing automatic upgrades.

  • We included several command line tools used by SecureDrop users to analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that cannot use the Additional Software feature:

    • PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents before publishing
    • Tesseract OCR to convert images containing text into a text document
    • FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video

  • Open ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx by default when starting KeePassX. If this database does not exist yet, stop pointing to it in the list of recent databases.

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.2:

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.4.

    This fixes a critical vulnerability in the JavaScript JIT compiler of Firefox and Tor Browser.

    Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this vulnerability.

    This vulnerability only affects the standard security level of Tor Browser. The safer and safest security levels are not affected.

  • Avoid a 2-minutes delay when restarting after doing an automatic upgrade. (#17026)

Code

  • We fixed critical regressions that were introduced while improving automatic upgrades.

  • We started work on making the download of automatic upgrades more robust (#15875).

  • We fixed the long delay while rebooting after applying an automatic upgrade (#17026).

  • In order to make the development process a bit smoother:

    • We now use the tarball with all Tor Browser langpacks (#17400), instead of downloading a complete Tor Browser for every language.
    • Our build system is now able to cache the website build.

Documentation and website

  • Göktürk Yüksek improved the dd command in the expert installation scenario to display progress (status=progress) and sync on-the-fly (oflag=direct).

  • We fixed the display of the output of rsync when doing a backup of the persistent volume.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. A lot of users are complaining about Seahorse failing to import public keys

  2. A few people reported graphic issues, mostly #16875, but also with Nvidia Turing

  3. Some users are facing issues (#17388, #17430, #17418) with some network adapter since 4.1.1

Infrastructure

  • We made progress on our migration to GitLab.

  • We resumed work on upgrading our CI hardware (#16960).

Funding

  • We added ThinkPenguin as a partner.

  • We teared down the donation campaign. We raised around 100k€ from 2 000 donations.

  • We were invited to submit a full proposal for the joint grant proposal with Tor and the Guardian Project to the DRL Internet Freedom program.

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 86% (5293) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy
  • es: 51% (3134) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • de: 34% (2143) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • it: 30% (1852) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 27% (1689) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 22% (1359) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 93% (1695) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • es: 90% (1636) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy
  • de: 64% (1168) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy
  • it: 60% (1094) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 43% (792) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 32% (596) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 856 922 times this month. This makes 27 643 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-02-11
Tails report for December, 2019

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.1:

Code

Documentation and website

User experience

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users reported various issues related to GPU nvidia and radeon.

  2. Seahorse still cannot import GPG keys (#17183) as well as other issues like encrypts file using most recent key only and connect to keyserver.

  3. Mac - kernel panic (fixed, caused an emergency release), graphical distorsions (there's a workaround), and no boot.

Infrastructure

  • We discussed our needs and desires regarding our upcoming GitLab instance and eventually decided to hosting it at immerda.ch.

    Thanks immerda.ch for your support since so many years!

  • We taught our CI to reproducibly build automatic upgrades.

Funding

Outreach

Past events

On-going discussions

  • Our Release Managers have been discussing how to adapt to the Firefox 4-weeks release cycle.

Press and testimonials

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 88% (5418) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 86% words translated
  • es: 51% (3137) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 42% words translated
  • de: 46% (2832) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated
  • fa: 32% (1982) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • it: 32% (1969) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy, 28% words translated
  • pt: 25% (1553) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 21% words translated

Total original words: 65286

Core pages of the website

  • fr: 96% (1705) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
  • es: 80% (1417) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 82% words translated
  • de: 71% (1252) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 74% words translated
  • it: 63% (1112) strings translated, 17% strings fuzzy, 65% words translated
  • pt: 45% (798) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
  • fa: 34% (615) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated

Total original words: 16439

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 819 136 times this month. This makes 26 424 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-01-21
Tails 4.2.2 is out

This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability in Tor Browser.

Updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 9.0.4.

    This fixes a critical vulnerability in the JavaScript JIT compiler of Firefox and Tor Browser.

    Mozilla is aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this vulnerability.

    This vulnerability only affects the standard security level of Tor Browser. The safer and safest security levels are not affected.

Fixed problems

  • Avoid a 2-minutes delay when restarting after doing an automatic upgrade. (#17026)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

None specific to this release.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.2.2

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from 4.2 to 4.2.2.

    Users of Tails 4.0, 4.1, and 4.1.1 have to upgrade to 4.2 first and then to 4.2.2.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.2.2:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.3 is scheduled for February 11.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-01-14 Tags:
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